The tone of this article is biographical and theoretical. Biographical, insofar as it concerns the author and his circumstances while also serving as a testimonial, probably partial and idiosyncratic, of the successes experienced by an entire generation of Argentineans in Diaspora. Although biographical, this is also a theoretical text that…

This paper outlines a theory of radical democratic education by addressing a key concept in Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: articulation. Through their concept of articulation, Laclau and Mouffe attempt to liberate Gramsci's theory of hegemony from Marxist economism, and adapt it to a political sphere inhabited by a plurality…

Among the most important questions critical educators can ask today are the following: Can schools play a role in making a more just society possible? If not, why not? If so, what can they do? These questions provide the basis for this article by Michael Apple, as well as for the books under discussion here. The books by David Blacker, John Marsh,…

The aim of this article is to pose some questions concerning "kairos" and feminist activism. In recent years state feminism in Spain has been presented as a "success story" of legislative victories and policy programmes regarding women' equality and equal opportunities. Only two years ago, feminist movements in Spain showed…

In this article Clayton Pierce reviews three books representative of the recent neo-Marxist literature on education: David Blacker's "The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame," John Marsh's Class Dismissed: "Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way out of Inequality," and Pauline Lipman's "The New Political…

This paper positions education as productive work, i.e. radical labour. It argues that education is a deliberate and conscious process directed to the building of human capacities to labour for socialist transformation. In drawing on the intellectual resources left by Marx the objective of education is the production of the "revolutionary…

If the recent revival in academic interest in Lenin's theory has overlooked his few writings on education, this may be because they appear to offer so little. This paper seeks to rectify this oversight. Whilst acknowledging that Lenin's educational offerings are thin, it is proposed that those on the left in the Twenty-First Century might…

In this article, I explore complex and contested interfaces between postcolonial and poststructural theories in the context of education, focusing on seemingly paradoxical epistemic demands related to justice and ethics. I start with a brief analysis of the heterogeneous and contested areas of poststructural and postcolonial theories in education,…

In this paper, we evaluate, and highlight the tensions between, radical, critical and Marxist education as they have played out in British education since the Enlightenment. Our argument has several parts. First, like other Marxists, we believe that consciousness is shifted as much through engagement with class struggle as through ideas. We…

In this essay Malott makes a case for a Marxist reading of education's role in expanding and reproducing capitalist societies. In the process he challenges the proposition that cognitive capitalism has fundamentally transformed the way in which capitalism operates. That is, rather than being guided by an internal capitalist logic, proponents of…

Michael Apple's "Ideology and Curriculum", published in 1979, helped initiate a broad turn in the field of education in the United States to Marxist thought as a lens through which to analyze the relationship between school and society. This classic text continues to inform scholarship in the field. While "Ideology" has…

The article offers a conversation with the ghost of the madman "Jacotot/Ranciere": one of the possible dialogues between the ignorant schoolmaster and my own perplexities in what I feel to be an endgame. Is there any point at the present time, in the declining mercantilist university, in pondering once again the issue of the place of philosophy in…

As critical pedagogy becomes more mainstream on the educational landscape in the United States, it is important to revisit the original tenets of critical pedagogy and explore their current manifestations. Since the beginning of "criticalism" from the theoretical/foundational work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory,…

Beginning with a reconsideration of what the school is and has been, this paper explores the idea of the school to come. Emphasizing the governmental role of education in modernity, I offer a line of thinking that calls into question the assumption of both the school and education as possible conduits for either democracy or social justice.…

This article takes up a text that Ranciere published shortly after "The Ignorant School Master" appeared in French, "Ecole, production, egalite" ["School, Production, Equality"] (1988), in which he sketched the school as being preeminently the place of equality. In this vein, and opposed to the story of the school as the place where inequality is…